


(...out on display...)

by josephina_x



Series: The Triangle Guy [8]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: ...Or is he?, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Bill isn’t Bill, Gen, Identity Issues, Post-Series, Post-Weirdmageddon, See You Next Summer, Two Years Later
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-29
Updated: 2017-12-29
Packaged: 2019-02-23 10:30:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13188207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/josephina_x/pseuds/josephina_x
Summary: The triangle makes and executes plans, somewhat satisfied with the way things currently are. But then Stanley is back, and everything goes all to hell.





	(...out on display...)

**Author's Note:**

> Fic: (...out on display…)  
> Fandom: Gravity Falls  
> Pairing: n/a  
> Rating: PG-13  
> Spoilers: through the end of the series, and some of the books (Journal #3)  
> Summary: The triangle makes and executes plans, somewhat satisfied with the way things currently are. But then Stanley is back, and everything goes all to hell.  
> Disclaimer: Not mine, not for profit.  
> AN: This one’s a bit longer, I didn’t feel like splitting it up. Meh.

\---

...So, it turns out that Sixer is still the dumbest genius he’s ever met.

That whole thing with the circle in the bottom of his cage cutting out when he touches the bottom of the cage? Yeah… that was the _whole thing_ not working anymore.

He’s found out in the quiet hours of the night that he can’t pull himself out of the center of the cage when he’s floating in the middle of it, even if he’s got two hands on one of the bars.

But if he’s not floating? Ha.

Turn sideways and slip _right_ out between the bars, with _plenty_ of space to spare. Easy-peasy.

He’s learned how to make a sighing sound without lungs, now, _just from that_.

The third hour of the second night, and he’s out-and-about. And the only reason he hadn’t been out sooner was because he’d spent the rest of that time thinking. The first night had just been him thinking about the differences between Stanley Pines and Bill Cipher, and who _he_ was. The second night, those first two hours were all about planning out what he was going to do, first, second, and third.

First? Wait until it’s dark enough out that he’s pretty sure that he isn’t going to be spotted.

Second? Get outside of his cage.

Check and check.

Third? Take down that stupid unicorn voodoo barrier thing, because he’s pretty sure that he doesn’t ever want to have to risk dealing with _that_ , ever.

Not that it’s a huge problem at the moment, but if he ever gets caught out and needs to get away… well, he’s learned the hard way that even a few seconds can count during a chase.

As it turns out, the voodoo thing doesn’t actually keep him from doing anything, so long as he’s inside it. He’s able to float just fine. And telling where people are? He began to get a handle on that already during the second day of tours, even before nighttime hit.

...Apparently he has a second eye behind his first, inside his head, sort of? It’s still a lot easier to see out his second eye with his first eye closed, but compared to the first day when he’d been straining to even get a vague ‘feel’ of locations and moods, now he can **see** things just as clearly as if the cloth wasn’t even in the way, at least in the museum part of the Shack.

A lot of things got easier, once he’d stopped being afraid of being Bill Cipher. Yeah. Not being in denial has done wonders for his perception.

Anyway, the voodoo barrier is _annoying_ , because night two comes and goes and he finds out that he isn’t able to pry any of the moonstones loose, or touch the line of unicorn hair around the Shack with his hands, either.

\---

It actually takes him another two whole days to figure out how to handle the voodoo barrier, and it’s almost an accident.

He hadn’t really thought about it before, because he still isn’t really remembering things _directly_ , but... he isn’t able to just float himself. He’s also able to float other stuff, too.

The end of the third night, he has trouble getting the cloth blanket out of the way to get back up into his cage. It’s not cooperating, and he’s already annoyed with his lack of progress, so he gets even more annoyed, and gestures, angry and just _wanting it to move_ , and…

Well. Cue the blanket moving, all right, and a couple of panicked minutes trying to get the blasted thing out of the rafters and over the cage again with a minimal amount of telltale splinters, post-haste. He makes it in time, but only about five minutes before Soos shows up in the morning for work again.

Night number four, and he’s spending a decent chunk of time practicing with moving that heavy piece of cloth material around the room, even folding and unfolding it midair.

And then he almost feels silly, later, when he tries moving around a few other things in the Shack museum that aren’t nailed down, and it turns out that moving anything that’s _rigid_ is as easy to do as having the thought itself.

Gestures help with fine motions, and maybe the theatricality of it all, but in general Bill doesn’t find them completely necessary.

Anyway, he’s stalled long enough.

He floats over to the ‘emergency exit’ door of the Shack museum and closes his first eye. He concentrates.

He can see inside the lock, sort of. Almost.

He reaches out a hand and mentally starts pushing the tumblers, one by one.

And when he thinks he has them all, he lifts his other hand and turns both of his hands together at the wrists.

The entire internal mechanism turns, and the doorknob lock clicks.

...Yes, he knows it’s stupid. Yes, he knows he could’ve gone out through one of the already-open windows. Yes, he could’ve chosen to go through a different door that locked from the inside, instead. But. He wanted to challenge himself, so he did.

He opens his eye and with another flick of his wrist, the doorknob turns and the door opens.

He floats out and performs the same wrist motion, closing the door behind him. He re-locks it -- much easier now that he’s on the “correct” side for it, and only has to turn the deadbolt.

Sixer’s not the only one who can be prepared to the point of paranoia, and having a half-hidden ‘emergency exit’ that’s really an emergency _entry_ has served him well over the years, both for getting away from pursuers on the outside, as well as ‘trapping’ wise-ass pursuers inside.

Most people don’t like jumping through ground-level windows, apparently.

...Except that had been Stanley, not him. He really needs to start catching himself when he does that. It’s not good for him, he’s pretty sure.

He shakes it off, and hovers down close to grass-level. He floats his way around the side of the Shack, and comes up underneath the kitchen window.

He closes his eye and double-checks, just to make sure, and -- yes -- there’s no-one in the kitchen or living room of the Shack, as far as he can tell.

He reaches up and carefully gestures, unlocking the kitchen window above the sink. He makes a very slow gesture that, in turn, slowly pushes the window up.

Next, the very tricky bit -- he opens his first, main, physical eye and floats up until he can see inside the kitchen, and then floats a knife out of the knife block on the kitchen counter via direct line-of-sight.

He really doesn’t want to risk anything falling down or falling over, because he’s had very little practice at floating things using only his second eye to see with, in areas that he… can’t seem to see as well inside, or around. Like the kitchen. He’s not sure what makes the difference yet, that has him stuck back at vague impressions at some times, but gives him clear imagery for others; it seems to be consistent depending on the location he’s trying to see, though. He knows he’ll figure it out eventually, though.

After all, doesn’t Bill Cipher have an _All-Seeing_ Eye?

Once he has the knife, things go rather quickly. He cuts through the unicorn hair in about three-dozen places, all around the barrier ring, and in three different places he uses the knife to pry away at it until he’s removed nearly an inch-long piece of it.

He knows it’s a tad bit of overkill, but he does it anyway, despite having felt it go down after the first cut.

It’s odd, he thinks. He knows he doesn’t need to breathe -- and he doesn’t breathe because he has no lungs -- but somehow the air in and around the Shack feels slightly less stale now that the barrier’s down.

Bill manages to get most, if not all, of the wood slivers out of the edges of the blade before he floats it back through the kitchen window. He leaves it to soak in a pan that’s already sitting in the bottom of the sink, instead of trying to put it back with the rest of the knives; he’s not so paranoid to think that anyone will be paranoid about it themselves if they notice it -- there are two families worth of people living in the Shack right now, and any one of them is perfectly capable of contributing to the dirty dishes pile.

And with that, he pulls down the kitchen window, closing it, and then relocks the latch on the window again.

He makes his way back inside the museum part of the Shack -- the easy way this time, through an already-open window -- and back over to his cage.

Step four is something he’s only just now decided upon: getting rid of Sixer’s circle in the bottom of the cage.

Or, rather, _replacing_ it with one that looks pretty enough, but does absolutely nothing.

He doesn’t know how he’s going to pull it off, though, because there’s no way that Soos is not going to notice it.

Soos is also not stupid. If he tries to talk the kid into ‘gussying up’ the bottom of the cage, he’ll be all ‘I dunno…’ and ask Sixer to do it for him, instead. ...And that would run the risk of Sixer realizing what a certain someone (...Sixer himself...) had screwed up six-ways-to-heaven, and then Sixer would oh-so-helpfully “fix” things so that he can’t get out anymore.

He _might_ be able to convince Soos to change stuff around himself, a bit, if he really _tries_ , but… he’d feel bad if the kid got caught in the crossfire later, when he inevitably gets found out. Because Sixer has got a pair of lungs on him, even with all the coughing these days. Sixer can yell, and the older twin can be mean as all get-out, especially when Sixer puts his mind to it (...and even when Sixer doesn’t, isn’t even trying…). He doesn’t want Soos to get blamed for anything that is well and truly in Sixer’s wheelhouse, thank-you-very-much, not even accidentally for a little while. Kid doesn’t need or deserve the stress.

Bill mulls over this for awhile, and then it slowly occurs to him… ‘ _Is this really necessary?_ ’

Because he’s already not stuck in the cage anymore. All he’d be getting is a few extra seconds at best, and while that can be of dire importance in the _middle_ of a chase, he knows he’s perfectly capable of distracting Sixer for a second or two at the _beginning_ of one, especially when it’s before Sixer even _knows_ that there’s going to _be_ a chase. A simple ‘Hey, what’s that?!’ would suffice; Sixer isn’t exactly known for having a lack of gullibility.

Getting rid of Sixer’s circle… it’s a boatload of risk to be taking on, with next to no reward. And while Stanley Pines would push the boundaries anyway, just because they were there and he _could_...

...he’s not Stanley Pines. He has at least something of a voice in his head, now -- or maybe just some small tugging gut instinct -- that can and is telling him, ‘That’s enough. There’s no need for any more.’

Stanley Pines may not be able to leave well enough alone, but… he’s not Stanley Pines.

So maybe he can?

So he tries to.

He lets himself think about it over the next couple of days when he’s not performing for the Shack tourists, and nights well after everyone is asleep, but Bill doesn’t think of anything that has a decent chance of working.

He does think of a couple good distraction tactics, though, ones that could easily give him at least those same number of seconds that he thinks he’d be gaining, otherwise.

And, if he’s being perfectly honest with himself, he needs those distraction tactics far more than the circle gone, anyway. Because if he ever tries to get out of this cage with Sixer staring him straight in the face…

...well, Sixer’s pretty much a deadeye with his sci-fi gun these days. He’d be shot in the front-face faster than he could blink.

So he slowly moves on. He moves on from ‘how can I get this circle gone?’ to ‘how can I best distract a trigger-happy Sixer?’ to ‘how can I distract _anyone_ who might want to attack me while I’m still inside this thing?’

In his off-hours, when he’s not having boatloads of fun scaring and creeping out and just playing at teasing the tourists that Soos shepherds on by him through the last part of the Shack’s museum, Bill works on trying to figure out what he used to be able to do as a triangle, and what he still can do as himself, as he is now, too.

He’s got a bottomless hat and a bowtie and a cane that he can each pull out of nowhere, and then send back again. (And he does; he _never_ brings any of them out during any of the tour group stuff -- he knows better than to push things that far. Soos _isn’t stupid_. Soos _will_ notice, and Soos _will_ say something, he is sure-and-certain of it.) The hat’s the best bit, because he starts storing stuff in it -- bobby pins and matchsticks, bottle caps and small bits of fluff. Just… little random things that he might find useful later, that he gathers overnight when everybody’s asleep and no-one is watching the trashcans by the house or the parking lot outside.

His memory’s never been really bad -- well, at least it wasn’t before the memory gun -- but now it feels like more of a steel trap. He’s not sure if it’s him, or if it’s got something to do with the second eye behind his first eye, but anything he’s seen at least once before, he can play back almost like a movie inside his head.

If he’s paying a little more… _attention_ when whatever-it-is is first happening, using his second eye at least a little bit, then it’s not just ‘like a movie’, it’s like having a movie that he can view from all sides whenever he wants -- more of a bubble than a magic ‘mirror-mirror on the wall’.

The tours go pretty well, and Bill is (re?-)learning the extent of his own powers, slowly. He’s feeling better, his color is improving (...as far as he can tell, with most yellows being just ‘yellow’ to him…), and Soos seems happy enough.

But then, two weeks in, everything is upended all over again.

\---

Bill hears the shriek even under the blanket from his cage in the Shack’s museum. He’s actually pretty sure that even dogs ten miles away could have heard that shriek. He’s almost amused by it, because here he’d thought that Soos had invested in some decent soundproofing for the walls of the Shack as part of the extensions and upgrades, but apparently they had nothing at all on Mabel’s vocal range.

Bill also hears the words that follow it, almost as clearly, and those have him losing any amusement he’d been feeling entirely and freezing in place where he is floating.

“ _ **GRUNKLE STAN!!!**_ ”

He hears more banging about, hears more -- muffled -- voices join the fray, voices that sound incontrovertibly happy if not outright _joyful_ , and his hands slowly clench into fists.

“Well-well-well,” he says to himself quietly, because it looks like Stanley Pines is back.

Back from whatever _hole_ he crawled under. --Because Stanley’d be too stupid to take the hole that was already there -- Stanley would just dig himself a new one, all the way to China. Because isn’t that _exactly_ what that screw-up _always_ does?

Bill Cipher listens to this, without even bothering to try and use his second eye -- he actively tries to keep it closed, he really _doesn’t_ need to have this scored into his mind for all eternity at all angles -- and he decides that he really, really, really _hates_ Stanley Pines.

\---

The Mystery Shack gets closed down for the rest of the day, all tours cancelled -- of course it does, and of course they are; why not? _Stanley Pines_ is back; rejoice!

Bill floats circles and circles and circles in his cage and tries very, _very_ hard not to start growling.

He’s angry. He’s angry at Stanley Pines receiving a hero’s warm welcome in there. And, if he’s honest with himself, he’s also insanely jealous, because he _wishes_ that was him.

He wishes, and he _wants_.

But this isn’t something he can have, and he knows it. So he tries to calm down, tries to force it all down and away, because this is not helping anything, least of all him, and he knows that.

...The air in the Shack museum helps. None of the Pines have been in here since forever-and-a-day, so the leftover vibes of the feelings in here aren’t _tainted_ by any of that.

He’s dreading the next time Soos comes in here, though, he really is. Soos is going to be full of smiles, and happiness, and bubbling-over of words about ‘the great Mr. Pines.’ He’s not sure he’ll be able to take it.

He doesn’t want to think of what might happen if Stanley himself comes in here, if any of the Pines do.

He hasn’t yet been exposed to their ridicule -- not _yet_. Not _really_. He closes his eye and holds his hands against the top of his front-face, mind aching already, because he can just hear it now: ‘ _Oh look, the mighty Bill Cipher, invincible dream demon; he started the end of the world, and look at him now. Outsmarted by two old men, defeated, and stuck in a cage performing tricks for tourists. Was that what you wanted when you finally got out of the Nightmare Realm, Bill? Huh? Huh?_ ’

And the laughter. The derision. The _smiles_.

He shudders.

He’s awake now, and truly aware. He’s aware of who he is and what he is and what he’s doing and what is going on around him. It’s not like it was before. There’s no _grey_ left anymore, for him to curl up and hide in, to wish the world away.

He’s not sure if he can take it, if Stanley Pines walks in here and rips the heavy cloth blanket covering off of his cage. Stares at him. Looks down on him again. Because this time...

Bill doesn’t know what he’ll do if he does.

Bill doesn’t know what _he’ll_ do if he does, in response.

And that scares him, just a little.

\---

He’s sitting down against the back bars of the cage -- he can get up again when he has to, he just doesn’t feel like it, right now -- when he hears yelling.

He startles a bit, and almost ends up back in the center of the cage floating.

He lets out a sighing sound, and pulls his pipecleaner legs up to his front-face, and tries not to listen in too hard as there is thumping, and running about, and loud voices and general nonsense going on.

The kitchen and the living room area aren’t exactly straight-up viewable to him. He can get general fuzzy feelings, and a sense of who is where, but…

...he can’t get much more than that. Not right now. Not as things currently stand with him.

He needs more practice. He needs more _something_. He just isn’t sure what.

He closes his eye, and opens his second, tentatively.

Pine Tree, Shooting Star, and Sheet Music are coming down the stairs. Question Mark is coming down the hallway, already on the first-floor. Abuelita is in the kitchen, maybe, he thinks. Sixer and… _Stanley_... are moving from the gift shop into the living room, and it’s no wonder that he’d been able to hear the yelling -- they’d been right below him, under the floor, not sideways on the other side of the walls that had had actual soundproofing installed.

He opens his first eye and shakes himself. It’s always hard for him to remember actual names when he does that. Because he finally gets it now, the nicknames -- which are really more the nicknames-that- _weren’t_ nicknames at all. They weren’t even symbols -- they were _concepts_.

Pine Tree is Dipper is a fourteen year old boy, about to turn fifteen at the end of this summer. But he’s _also_ a real, live, alive and living _tree_ , strong and tall with deep roots, long branches reaching for the widest expanses of horizon and sky, prickly needles for anybody who gets too close to him in the wrong way, and he just smells _evergreen_ inside Bill’s mind -- which doesn’t make any sense because he’s a triangle without even a nose, but… it also sort-of _does_. And he is. That’s just him. Dipper Pine-Tree Mason Pines.

Shooting Star is Mabel is so hard to look at sometimes, Bill wants to put on and wear a pair of mental sunglasses any time he even glances in her direction, and she leaves a glowing sparkly comet trail of happiness behind her in her wake, wherever she goes.

Melody is Sheet Music, and the notes change from time to time. Bill wants to play her on a piano sometimes, which always makes him feel a little bit odd because he doesn’t actually _remember_ how to play the piano, he just knows that he should, and should be able to. Something _interesting_ will happen if he ever does that, he just doesn’t know what.

Soos is a big Question Mark, always has been and always will be. He’s never really understood him, and maybe he never will? But that’s okay, because he’s still Soos. He doesn’t always need to understand what’s going on in that kid’s head, so long as he’s happy enough.

Abuelita is… somebody Bill (...or is that Stanley -- _does it really matter which?!?!_ …) just doesn’t want to mess with. _Ever._ She’s Soos’s, and Soos is hers, and Soos definitely gets his easygoing from her, but he just as definitely _didn’t_ inherit quite the same type of quiet calm straightforward as she has, because that woman could cut the legs out from under you with words alone at two hundred paces without breaking a sweat. And then do it again at one-hundred. And fifty. And twenty. And… there’s probably a reason Soos’s father has never made an appearance in Gravity Falls in all the years since he’s been missing-and-gone, and that reason is probably some working form of survival instinct when it comes to _her_ , haha.

Sixer is six-fingers is really a _lot_ more complicated than that, because he’s actually _five fingers_ and one _very_ awkward thumb, and the less said about _that_ the better.

_Stanley_ is… a conglomeration of images and thoughts and concepts that really just gives Bill one great big headache. He’s not sure if the problem has to do with Stanley, the great big con-artist, having been inside Stanley’s mind, which got melted, or with Bill himself, who had been in there when it had happened.

Stanley is an ace, high-low card. He’s big-fish little-fish and all the water in-between to swim in, that you can’t see. He’s the moon trying to devour the sun… or is it the other way around? He is everything and nothing, and he’s a fire that burns without smoke. He wore his symbol on a Fez, wrapped himself up in even more Mystery for three decades of lost time, and then gave it all to Question Mark to keep when he decided he was done with it.

Stanley is Stanley is a headache and a half for Bill, and not just because of one solid right-hook that one time that he _still_ can’t remember from the right-wrong side of things.

Bill closes both eyes, and rubs a thumb and finger under his physical eye, frowning at the corners, because he’s getting a headache already, just from that, and they’re calling a family meeting about _something_ in there, one that Bill can’t hear all too well.

He can get a sense of the moods as they spark off of their minds (...for anybody except Sixer, stupid two-inch metal plate…), and he can hear the rise and fall of their speech patterns almost, but that’s hardly enough for him to squeeze any actual _meaning_ out of anything.

He only really starts to worry when he feels _Soos_ starting to worry, because that’s about as uncommon an occurrence as they come.

He winces in place when he hears the “YOU DID **WHAT?!?!?!?!?** ” without any problems at all.

And he’s about halfway to guessing what all the fuss is about when he hears stomping footsteps and slamming doors, louder and louder like they’re coming closer, and it’s not too hard to get the rest of it when he barely has a second to get himself upright and floating before Sixer rips the blanket off of his cage so hard he nearly pulls it off of the stand it’s sitting on.

Sixer, he can see, is very much _not happy_ right now.

Bill is beginning to think that maybe, just maybe, Sixer _hadn’t_ been the one to move him out of the twins attic room, and down into the museum area here, after all.

And he wonders if maybe the kids had actually talked it over between them and decided to give him over to Soos themselves, on their own, on purpose. It would almost make a kind of sick sense if they had, Bill thinks. Because he _had_ been broken, badly; so why _not_ give him over to the Shack’s handyman to be fixed? ...And it had _worked_ , too. Soos is a good handyman.

“...Problem?” Bill hears from the doorway to the gift shop, and well. Well. _Well._ Bill really isn’t one to let an opening like _that_ slide, even if it _did_ come calling to him courtesy of one Stanley Pines.

“Hmmmm,” Bill says, crossing his arms in front of him and floating in place, while looking up at Sixer from the inside of his cage. “You know, I’m _not sure_ ,” he grinds out smoothly. “ **Is** there a problem, here, Stanley?”

Sixer looks about two seconds away from having an apoplectic fit, for not being addressed directly, and Bill is pretty sure that he is enjoying this _waaaaay_ too much, even for being a triangle demon.

But then… suddenly Sixer _isn’t_ looking like he’s about to have a fit of any sort at all, anymore. He’s staring down at Bill instead, with a complete lack of expression on his face.

And Bill is starting to think that maybe the ‘question mark’ should really be passed off to Sixer at some point, because this is getting downright _ridiculous_.

“How long has he been in here?” Sixer says almost tonelessly, as he stares down at Bill, and Bill looks right back up at him, matching him stare-for-stare.

“Uh, about four weeks, Other Mr. Pines,” Bill hears Soos say, and he can’t help but flick his gaze in the kid’s direction, because _had he heard that right?_

“Those first two weeks? Uh, he wasn’t looking so good,” Soos continues on. “Kinda grey-sad. Dude needed a couple days to feel better and then get used to stuff, and all. He didn’t move around so much. Yeah...”

Bill suppresses a shiver, because... _had he understood that right?_ Had he really been in here for _two weeks_ on-exhibit, without being aware of a single solitary thing that had been happening all around or to him, before he’d realized what was going on and started to wake back up?

He… he’d had no real sense of the passage of time.

He hadn’t really worried about that before, when he’d been in Sixer’s secret lab room, on that desk and then up on that shelf, losing several months of time at a time in the grey, but...

“So, the past two weeks, he’s been up and about,” Bill hears Sixer say in even tones with zero inflection in his voice.

He moves his gaze back up to Sixer, and doesn’t say a word. Keeps his arms crossed. Floats there in place and narrows his eye a bit as the silence stretches on.

He’s not Sixer’s muse anymore, if he ever was; he doesn’t have to respond to his statements or his questions.

Sixer looks down at him, looks down _on_ him, and then gives him a not-so-very-nice smile.

“What’s your game, Cipher?” Sixer says.

“ _Chess_ ,” Bill snaps out, without meaning to, and he barely keeps his expression in the same annoyed squint, while internally he’s thinking, ‘ _What? What did I just--_ ’

Sixer doesn’t say anything in response, just keeps giving him a stone-faced stare.

Bill glances away from them all, feeling a bit off-balance, because he’s _really_ **not** sure where that came from, and that worries him.

“Hm,” Sixer says finally, and Bill barely resists the urge to bristle.

What he really wants to do is scream at him. Get angry. Demand to know why he put him in a cage in the first place. Rage at him about being shoved up onto a high shelf, covered up, lost, and forgotten, like he meant absolutely _nothing_ to him.

...But he also wants to do none of those things at all. He is so, so tired of having to play at Sixer’s pace, dance to Sixer’s tune, get tangled up in all his strings trying to sort everything out until he’s strangling himself on them. Sixer, who is and was supposed to be his friend, until the end of time, and _who had been the one to lie first, huh?_

What he _really_ wants to say is, ‘ _I don’t need you anymore, and maybe I never did._ ’ But he isn’t so sure that that isn’t a lie, which is why he ends up not saying anything at all.

The truth of the matter, Bill realizes, is that the only thing really keeping him here right now is one person, and that person isn’t Sixer -- it’s Soos. And Soos doesn’t really need him here, either.

So why is he still here?

“This isn’t secure,” Bill hears Sixer say, and his eye snaps right back over to him.

“Huh?” Bill hears one of the younger twins say, but he only hears them faintly; he’s having trouble sorting out who is saying what just then, because suddenly he’s feeling cold-cold-cold.

“This isn’t a secure arrangement,” Sixer repeats. “Anyone could touch his cage, and potentially mess with the circle.” He watches as Sixer turns and moves away from him, _turns his back on him_ , and now he’s feeling even colder. “We’ll need to secure the cage to the pedestal, and place a glass container over it, then padlock that down, too.”

If Bill still had ears, he’d be hearing the rush of blood going through them, he’s pretty sure right now, and _Sixer still isn’t looking at him_.

He’s staring after Sixer, as Sixer leaves the room and _doesn’t look back_ , and he wants to scream. Throw things. **Break everything**.

He’s shaking in place.

He forces his gaze away, turns away, feels his arms drop to dangle at his sides, feels his hands clench and unclench into fists. Forces himself to calm down. Has to pull on the last dregs of the lingering aura that the tour groups from earlier today had left behind, to do it. Barely manages it, even then. Barely manages to stop shaking in place where he floats.

The kids leave, Soos leaves. Melody and Abuelita were never there.

Stanley _stays_.

Bill can see him in the periphery of his vision, in the doorway, leaning against the doorjamb, watching him, arms crossed.

“He doesn’t know, does he?” Stanley says.

“--Know _what?!_ ” Bill snarls out, swiveling up in place to glare at Stanley Pines.

But then he stops short and everything in him comes to a screeching halt, when he sees the look Stanley Pines is giving him.

And it comes to him in a flash. He knows now, without a shadow of a doubt, _**exactly**_ why Stanley Pines left.

Bill turns away first.

“You didn’t tell him,” he hears Stanley say, and Bill closes his eye.

“No,” Bill says.

There’s a pause.

“Do you want me to tell him?” he hears Stanley say.

“ **No** ,” Bill says, opening his eye, and now he’s shaking again. So is his voice. And he knows exactly how badly he’s damning himself when he says, “ _Either he figures it out on his own, or he doesn’t figure it out at all._ ”

He hears Stanley shift slightly in place. “You know he’s never going to figure it out on his own.” It isn’t a question; it’s a reminder of who Sixer is and what Sixer is like. What he is, down at the core of things. As if Bill didn’t already know.

Bill slowly clenches his fists.

He feels Stanley look away from him. “Fair enough.”

Bill floats in place, and his thoughts shift, ever so slightly, to other things.

“You know,” he tells Stanley. “I think I may hate you a little.”

Stanley barks out a laugh. “The feeling’s mutual.”

Bill nods to himself, once, in a bobbing sort of motion.

And while Stanley Pines looks on, he shoves himself backwards, pulls himself down to the bottom of the cage, and yanks himself out between the bars. And from there, he floats forward and out of the nearest already-open window.

And the entire time, Stanley Pines doesn’t lift a finger to stop him. He doesn’t move a muscle, doesn’t call out, doesn’t try and talk to him further, doesn’t tell him he should change his mind.

Doesn’t tell him he deserves it.

So Bill goes.

Bill goes, he’s gone. He leaves, and leaves the Shack behind.

\---


End file.
